Reviews J. Paul Hunter. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction. New York: Norton, 1990. xxvi + 421pp. US$25.00. ISBN 0-39302801 -1. Few books on the dawning of the novel actually hang around to observe the moment of sunrise. Either they have moved on to the early hours of daylight, as with Ian Watt, or else they start at midnight, like Michael McKeon, and lose interest after the first streaks of red have appeared on the horizon. But J. Paul Hunter really does fix his gaze on the dawn, that is, concentrate on the precise juncture when the English novel took off: his is a specialized cultural history which centres on the period roughly 16501720 , selecting materials which seem to bear on the emergence of the new form. There is a certain amount of theoretical baggage, as is unavoidable for anyone writing such a book in the 1990s. Nonetheless, Hunter's essential purpose lies in assembling components of the novel, whether literary modes or religious ways of thinking or cultural practices, which were strongly in evidence during the period defined and which can be seen as (in some way or other, in greater or lesser measure) constitutive of the innovatory form taken by the novel. That the form was truly innovative Hunter is in no doubt. He addresses the question early on with a chapter entitled "What Was New about the Novel?" and supplies the fullest answer to this question we have ever been given. The need is seen especially to move away from the categories bequeathed to us by Clara Reeve, and to "look beyond romance" (p. 28). Hunter's own argument is divided into three parts, labelled 'Texts" (a broad theoretical and historical placing of the issues), "Contexts" (what it suggests, including attitudes to time and place in die period), and "Pre-texts" (actually models and genres which contributed to the new mix). All three sections work together well, and each contains matter of great interest and originality. This is not merely the most intellectually ambitious book Hunter has written: it is the most shapely in construction, and much the best written. Whatever arguments in detail one may have about the argument (and I have one on nearly every page), the book makes a strong, coherent, and intelligent case. It is based on massive reading in primary materials, above all in what Hunter might call EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 3, April 1992 266 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:3 the paraliterature of the age—such things as conduct books, devotional manuals, guides to this and that, tales of miraculous and providential events, and so on. There is also evidence of extensive reading in relevant secondary literature within such areas as social history and demography (how effectively this is used I will come to shortly). Oddly, there is not much evidence in the book of unusually deep reading in the novel itself: for reasons sufficiently well explained, Hunter chooses to make his application chiefly to mainstream eighteenth-century novels. There is the possible side-effect that his theories seem to be drawn to fit Tom Jones but not Amelia, Robinson Crusoe but not A New Voyage Round the World. Most of the attempts to scramble Tristram Shandy into the plan end up rather strained. Finally, though Hunter shows a welcome readiness to treat women's novels on an ad eundem basis, there is a markedly narrow range of texts— Haywood is always represented by Betsy Thoughtless (untypical in its manifest debt to Fielding), Lennox by The Female Quixote, Burney by her first and arguably thinnest book, Evelina. Whatever Hunter touches on, he adorns with sensible and often acutely phrased commentary : there is an especially fetching discussion of fairy tales as a traditional way of storytelling which, according to some, was on the way out in this very period. There is an ingenious "triangulation" of gin, Methodism, and the novel (pp. 130-35); and an intensely absorbing consideration of the new solitariness Hunter detects in the lonely Augustan crowd. The third part of the book is particularly successful. Some of the genres which are seen as contributing their rivulets to the swelling tide of the...